Prize for Economics

Amartya Sen was awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members. Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that Sen’s work "restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems." In recognizing his work on the social underpinnings of economics, the Nobel Committee broke with its tradition of the previous few years of awarding its prize to those researchers, most of them conservative, working in the field of market economics.

Welfare economics is the branch of economics that seeks to evaluate economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community. Sen, who devoted his career to such issues, had been called the "conscience of his profession." His influential monograph Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), which addressed problems such as individual rights, majority rule, and the availability of information about individual conditions, inspired many researchers to turn their attention to issues of basic welfare. Sen devised methods of measuring poverty that yielded information useful to improving economic conditions for the poor. His theoretical work on inequality provided an explanation for why there are fewer women than men in some poor countries in spite of the fact that more women than men are born and infant mortality is higher among males. Sen claimed that this skewed ratio results from the better health treatment and childhood opportunities afforded boys in those countries.

Sen’s interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of lives was unnecessary, Sen concluded, given that there was, he believed, an adequate food supply in India at the time. Its distribution was hindered, however, because particular groups of people--in this case rural labourers--lost their jobs and therefore their ability to purchase food. In his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. Instead, a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems, led to starvation in certain groups in society.

Governments and international organizations handling food crises were influenced by Sen’s work. His views encouraged policy makers to pay attention not only to alleviating immediate suffering but also to finding ways to replace the lost income of the poor, as, for example, through public-works projects, and to maintain stable prices for food. A vigorous defender of political freedom, Sen believed that famines do not occur in functioning democracies because their leaders must be more responsive to the demands of the citizens. In order for economic growth to be achieved, he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and public health, must precede economic reform.

Sen was born in Santiniketan, Bengal, India, on Nov. 3, 1933, and was educated at Presidency College in Calcutta. He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his B.A. (1955), M.A. (1959), and Ph.D. (1959). While at Trinity he was awarded the Adam Smith Prize (1954), the Wrenbury Scholarship (1955), and the Stevenson Prize (1956). He taught economics at a number of universities in India and England, including the Universities of Jadavpur (1956-58) and Delhi (1963-71), the London School of Economics, the University of London (1971-77), and the University of Oxford (1977-88), before moving to Harvard University (1988-98), where he was professor of economics and philosophy. In 1998 he was appointed to his current position as master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Sen was the sixth Indian to win a Nobel Prize and the first to be awarded the economics prize.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.